The plant philosophy that has arisen in recent decades, mainly in a Euro-American context, is related to, but distinct from, the recent crop of popular books on plants (especially trees) and fungi that advocate for a better understanding of the complexities of plant and fungal life, often by ascribing to them attributes or forms of behaviour previously reserved for animals (e.g. motion, sensitivity, perception) or reserved more particularly for humans (e.g. intelligence, consciousness). Together, plant philosophy and plant and fungal advocacy contest what they see as a general under-estimation of plants and a cultural failure to take plants seriously, in several respects. According to writers in these fields, we simply do not pay enough attention to plants. We take them for granted, objectify and ‘exploit’ them, notably in their reduction to agro-capitalist commodities. As plant life stands metonymically for ‘nature’ as a whole, the devaluation and commodification of plants is at the same time the devaluation and commodification of nature as a whole, which has contributed to the capitalist-driven global environmental catastrophe that faces us today. Plant philosophy, further, finds an explanation and justification for this devaluation of plant life in the foundational categories of Western philosophy, or finds that devaluation to be part of the foundation of that metaphysics.

(estimates vary but at least 80 per cent of all biomass on the planet is thought to be vegetal; recent estimates go as high as 99 per cent)

In his overview of the field Hiernaux identifies three common tendencies in attempts to philosophize on the vegetal, which are all forms of intellectual resistance to traditional conceptions of the living being (le vivant): resistance to animal models, resistance to the idea of the organism as an individual and resistance to the duality organism/ environment. 3 It is the being of plants themselves that resist these traditional conceptions of the living being, in the sense that the latter are inadequate to the specificity of vegetal being.

Whereas, scientifically, it would usually be thought right to distinguish between plants, fungi and algae, 9 this book will work with the philosophical category of the ‘plant’ or the ‘vegetal’, encompassing all three of those groups. Vegetal philosophy is concerned with conceptual, not evolutionary, phylogeny.

Plant behaviour, according to Anthony Trewavas, is ‘what plants do’, 2 rather than what they are, or what attributes they have. Plant behaviours include foraging for light, water and nutrients, which involves the movement of roots (as directional growth) and leaves and reactions of various kinds to stress or attack (e.g. leaf closures and emission of noxious substances, but also growth and gross morphogenesis itself, which is characteristically extremely plastic in plants). 3 Throughout the twentieth century attempts to understand these plant behaviours mostly referred to the fundamental aspects of plant physiology–cell biology, biochemistry and metabolism–and to genetics, evolution and ecology. Effectively, there seemed to be a presupposition that all plant behaviour could in principle be explained in biochemical terms as automatic reaction or reflex.

By the late twentieth century, however, a controversial new tendency in the scientific study of plant behaviour had emerged, insisting that its descriptions and explanations be expanded to include reference to phenomena normally only associated with animal (or even more exclusively, human) behaviour: sensory perception (sight, hearing, taste and so on), communication, intelligence, intention, memory and learning.

what is it to be a plant? What is it in plant life that sets plants apart from animals, that resists zoocentric models and problematizes the traditional categories of Western metaphysical thought? The principle of organization of a plant body is so different from that of an animal that, in thinking this through, the cryptic metaphysics in which the modern idea of the ‘organism’ is suspended becomes visible. In the most general biological sense an organism is a synonym for a living entity; in its conceptual genealogy it is an organized body, a self-organizing, integrated whole-part unit. 75 Animals are (in general–there are exceptions) organisms in this sense: integrated whole-part units, with specific organs for specific functions (albeit they interact), usually under the control of a centralizing (precisely, organizing) function (the brain). Even brainless animals are integrated, with some specific organs for specific functions. Plants, on the contrary, are not centrally organized; they have no brain equivalent. Their functions are not distributed across specific organs; indeed, as almost all plant philosophers and advocates point out, plants have no organs. 76 The principle of organization of a plant is modularity; that is, plants are made up of repeated ‘units’ (although, as we shall see, even this word is questionable). Each shoot (so, on a tree, each branchlet or twig) produces, indefinitely, reiteratively, functional units (called phytomers) comprising bud and leaf and often flower. In this way the plant clones itself–clones its basic form–on itself, indefinitely. It has no final form. 77 A modular principle of organization means that damaged or lost parts can be replaced, which is essential for beings subject to herbivory. It means that a plant can be cut up into separate parts, which can then each continue to grow independently. This regeneration and reiteration of parts is possible because plant cells are not specialized, even though they become differentiated.

A bare cutting from the stem of a flowering plant, a section with no buds or leaves, planted in soil can grow roots and buds and flowers–the entire plant form can be reconstructed relatively quickly from only one part of it. 80 The embryonic cells at the tips of roots and stems (meristems) will anyway continue to produce the cells needed for all parts of the plant.

Non-centralized organization, modularity and cell totipotency mean that plants are morphologically extremely plastic. An animal, as Hallé puts it, is essentially a mobile volume with a modest surface area. As it grows its volume increases while its form stays more or less the same. A plant, by contrast, is essentially a surface; as it grows it changes form to maximize this surface.

Roots from different plants (both of the same and of different species) may fuse; most–perhaps 80 per cent–of the plants survive only because of usually symbiotic relation with fungi, called mycorrhizal relations, where the hyphae of fungi grow in or attach to plant roots to effectively become part of the plant–or is it that the plant becomes part of the fungus? These subterranean mycorrhizal networks can stretch across whole forests, connecting huge numbers of plants and fungi sharing nutrients and water and communicating chemical and electrical signals. Where or what is the ‘individual’ in these forms of life? 95

Coccia argues that plant being is ‘the most intense, the most radical, and paradigmatic form of being in the world. To interrogate plants means to understand what it means to be in the world’. As plants transform solar energy into their living bodies, bodies upon which all animal life depends, the life of plants is ‘a cosmogony in action, the constant genesis of our cosmos’. 112 Being completely exposed to the world, ‘in absolute continuity and total communion with the environment’–indeed, plants make the environment–plant being teaches us that being in the world means ‘transcendental immersion’: ‘There is no material distinction between us and the rest of the world.’ ‘Everything is in everything’, as the title of one of Coccia’s chapters has it.

whereas the jettisoning of inappropriate animal models and metaphors is generally seen as basic to the inauguration of scientific botany, the situation is quite otherwise with sex, where progress is measured in terms of the acceptance of the literal truth of the animal model for plants.

the technical vocabulary of plant reproduction and ecology extends beyond ‘male’ and ‘female’ to include also ‘mother’, ‘sister’, ‘parent’, ‘offspring’ and so on. Is this a literal or a metaphorical biological vocabulary? On the whole plant philosophy accepts this terminology, or at least refrains from any critical investigation of it. But what, if anything, is the effect of such a vocabulary on the scientific and philosophical understanding of plants? Is there any way that the idea of a ‘mother’, for example, can be anything other than zoocentric? Is there any way that a terminology derived from human social relations can be anything other than anthropomorphic?

Plants alone, of all living forms, have a dibiontic life cycle–that is, two different multicellular stages, also known as alternation of haploid and diploid generations (in one generation the organism has a single set of chromosomes; in the other it has a double set).

the forms of each plant with which we are most familiar–what we generally think of as the plant itself–are just one phase of the plant life cycle, most often the sporophyte but sometimes the gametophyte phase or generation. The diploid sporophyte generation includes cells capable of undergoing meiosis, as in animals. In animals, meiosis produces haploid gametes that may then fuse with other haploid gametes in fertilization (also called syngamy) to produce diploid zygotes. An animal gamete cannot live by itself and only in exceptional circumstances can it grow by itself into a new haploid individual. 116 In plants, however, meiosis produces haploid spores. These spores cannot undergo syngamy (precisely because they are not gametes), but do divide mitotically to produce an entirely new, haploid plant–the gametophyte. The haploid gametophyte produces haploid gametes (as the name suggests) by mitosis; these gametes then undergo syngamy to produce a new diploid sporophyte. The sporophyte and the gametophyte that are the two generations of a life cycle do not resemble each other at all (and the gametophyte may develop within the sporophyte).

sex is defined in terms of anisogamy (reproduction via the fusion of two gametes of different sizes).

the postulation of the three ‘parts’ of the soul (psuchē) or three kinds of soul: nutritive (or vegetable), perceptive (or sensitive) and rational. Aristotle postulates that soul is a substance as ‘the form of a natural body which has life in potentiality’.

The functional, quantitative conception of plant gender measures the relative paternal and maternal investments of a plant, calculating ‘the proportions of a plant’s genes that are most likely to be transmitted through pollen (its maleness) or through its own seeds (its femaleness), based on expenditure on androecia and gynoecia’. 66 Calculating the gender of a plant–its functional maleness or functional femaleness–is based on pollen, ovule or seed counts, or on the number of flowers bearing pollen, ovules or seeds.

The second main aspect of Lloyd’s functional definition of gender is that ‘it has no meaning for single plants considered apart from the population in which they would interbreed’. 73 Whereas the morphological (phenotypic) conception of gender only considers single plants (or flowers), the functional conception of gender ‘considers a plant’s sexual performance in relation to that of the other individuals in the population’. 74 Whether any plant with both gynoecia and androecia will be male, female or ‘co-sexual’ 75 depends on the other plants in that population. The morphology of gynoecia and androecia alone cannot determine it except in the case of strictly unisexual populations (where individuals can only produce either male or female gametes, never both), and even then occasional ‘hermaphrodite’ flowers of plants will still be classed as either male or female (whereas in a monomorphic population with only such flowers, they would be co-sexual).

the identification of any plant or flower (or any ‘morph’) 76 as ‘male’, ‘female’ or ‘co-sexual’ is not a static identification of the innate sexual being or nature of any given individual or flower but a snapshot within a dynamic population, especially where–as is common–the different sexual systems and genders shade into each other.

it is the sexual strategies of populations of a given species that determine the identification of the gender of any individual plant, marking a significant break from the individual-centred morphological approach and definitively casting aside the idea that there is anything obvious about plant sex.

it is generally recognized that it is not strictly speaking correct to refer to the flowers, flower parts or individual sporophyte plants as ‘male’ and ‘female’, and indeed it is recognized that this practice is a remnant of the zoological model and its presumptions–the presumptions that one will find sexual organs and sexed individuals bearing those organs, just as is common in the animal realm.

The nature, and extent, of the underground mycorrhizal networks in forests is becoming clearer. The understanding of the role of these networks in connecting plants–especially trees–and facilitating nutrient and water exchange between them is revealing a specifically fungal and phytological mode of inter-existence, the recognition of which could revolutionize forest management and which may well be exceptionally important in understanding climate change and in developing strategies to combat its effects.

the perceived ‘authenticity’ of Western scientific work when it seems to echo aspects of indigenous wisdoms is no doubt part of its appeal to the alienated (perhaps anti-capitalist, eco-critical or simply jaded, exhausted and proletarianized) Western subject.

we will examine the idea of the Mother Tree in the context of what we will call the ‘maternal botanical imaginary’, in relation to attempts to talk about the possible connections between indigenous wisdom and Western science and philosophy and through the critical challenge posed by Viveiros de Castro’s anthropo-philosophy.

The use of the term ‘embryo’ in botany thus functioned, as Ingensiep puts it, as a ‘conceptual cluster for describing and deciphering shapes in early stages of plant development’. 9 It is not the result of a discovery, the discovery that the plant develops from the embryo just like the animal. It is part of a process of the transformation of an analogy with animals into an identification of parts and the adoption of a scientific terminology, borrowed from studies of animal development, into botany. By the end of the eighteenth century, and thanks to the influence of the German botanist Joseph Gärtner, the term was widely accepted as ‘correct’. 10

In English the constellation of ‘embryo’, ‘embryo sac’, ‘ovary’ and ‘ovule’, most of which are specifically female structures, gives rise to a maternal botanical imaginary.

the imaginary is part of the theoretical enterprise, an element within it, not a ‘dross coming from elsewhere, or a duplicate, serviceable to the reader’s deficient culture yet dispensable’.

the forestry practice of clear-cutting–razing managed pine forests and replanting seedlings in areas made and kept free from other plants as much as possible, including with the use of herbicides. Clear-cutting presupposes that different species will inevitably and only compete for soil resources and light, and that freeing fir trees from the competition (which is classed as ‘weeds’) will result in more and better wood production. Simard established that, on the contrary, fir seedlings flourished when they were able to become established with mycorrhizal networks (seedlings in experiments fared much better when planted in old growth soil that already contained fungal organisms, and not in those where herbicides had killed them) and, perhaps more surprisingly, when planted with birch seedlings.

Simard’s work also focuses on the mycorrhizal networks themselves, unearthing, mapping and modelling the underground networks, leading her to conceive of the forest as a complex, dynamic, adaptive, intelligent system, 29 an understanding of which is crucial in developing strategies to manage or mitigate climate change.

One study concludes that the mycorrhizal symbiosis is not just between two or more organisms but is a complex assemblage of fungal and plant individuals spanning multiple generations. All ‘individuals’ are thus nodes in the network, but the same study shows that within this assemblage the degree of connectivity (‘ node degree’) of an individual tends to correlate with its size and age. The tree with the highest ‘node degree’ in one cluster was found to be directly linked to forty-seven other trees:

When her research began to demonstrate the extent and importance of the interconnectedness of the forest organisms, Simard explains her growing appreciation of the fact in explicitly anthropomorphic terms: ‘Ecosystems are so similar to human societies–they’re built on relationships. The stronger these are, the more resilient the system.’ She compares the ecosystem to an orchestra, to the human brain and to family relations: ‘The cohesion of biodiversity in a forest, the musicians in an orchestra, the members of a family growing through conversation and feedback, through memories and learning from the past… They are complex. Self-organizing. They have the hallmarks of intelligence.’

Simard’s anthropomorphic model is deployed in the service of a moral anti-anthropocentrism: Our modern societies have made the assumption that trees don’t have the same capacities as humans. They don’t have nurturing instincts. They don’t cure one another, don’t administer care. But now we know that Mother Trees can truly nurture their offspring. Douglas firs, it turns out, recognize their kin and distinguish them from other families and different species. They communicate and send carbon, the building block of life, not just to the mycorrhizas of their kin but to other members of the community. To help keep it whole. They appear to relate to their offspring as do mothers passing their best recipes to their daughters. 40

her insistence on the avowedly anthropomorphic idea of the Mother Tree is part of a critique of the narrow, scientistic, short-termist and instrumental view of nature as a potential resource to be exploited.

To evoke the Mother Tree is both to signal that the scientistic, instrumental view is not her ways of doing things–the maternal botanical imaginary is a participatory element in the scientific enterprise–and that this was also not the way of the indigenous or First Nations peoples evicted from the lands on which her research now takes place. Further, as Simard acknowledges, some of what comes as a recent revelation to Western science is foundational to various indigenous schemes of thinking–that the forest (and beyond) is an interconnected whole; that there are underground root-fungal networks; that some trees, which some indigenous peoples have long called Mother Trees, have a particularly important role to play; and that an ecosystem is a matter of dynamic balance.

UNESCO defines ‘indigenous knowledge’ as follows: Local and indigenous knowledge refers to the understandings, skills and philosophies developed by societies with long histories of interaction with their natural surroundings. For rural and indigenous peoples, local knowledge informs decision-making about fundamental aspects of day-to-day life. This knowledge is integral to a cultural complex that also encompasses language, systems of classification, resource use practices, social interactions, ritual and spirituality. 47

Wall Kimmerer distinguishes between the practice of science (which can work with indigenous knowledge) and the scientific world view (which cannot).

Wall Kimmerer sees the ‘withering away’ of ceremony in the ‘dominant society’ as a symptom of its alienation from nature and from forms of collective self-understanding. 53 But again, she asks, what meaning can indigenous ceremony–often focused on other species or on the seasons, for example–have for us today? The Western appropriation of such First Nations ceremonies is both morally reprehensible and somewhat absurd (or at the least shallow and artificial).

Wall Kimmerer’s book is thus also a warning to Western readers, as approaching indigenous knowledge means understanding the extent to which you do not understand.

The difficult relationship between Western science and indigenous knowledge( s) is in some respects mirrored in the difficult relationship between Western philosophy and indigenous philosophies. Dale Turner’s reflections on this in the context of his work on Aboriginal rights in Canada and indigenous intellectual culture are helpful to understanding this. Turner, a political philosopher and a member of the Temagami First Nation (which is also one of the Anishinaabe Nations), identifies three indigenous projects in philosophy. The first he calls ‘doing “indigenous philosophy” proper. This kind of activity involves highly specialized forms of thinking; it is a distinctively indigenous activity’. 56 The second is doing European philosophy as an indigenous person, promoting cross-cultural philosophical dialogue with the aim–importantly–of making a political difference to indigenous lives. The third–his own kind of philosophy–is the critical engagement of European ideas as a philosophical exercise and a political activity, making ‘an investigation of the meaning and praxis of colonialism a central activity of an indigenous intellectual community’. 57 Turner is clear that the first project, to the extent that it might happen within non-indigenous contexts and with the aim of educating non-indigenous persons, is fraught with inherent epistemological problems because such philosophy is rooted in oral tradition and in indigenous languages. It remains to be seen, he writes, whether indigenous philosophies of knowledge ‘can be articulated in English’. Although ‘finding the right “place” for terms like “spirituality” is essential to a critical indigenous philosophy’, Turner refuses to put himself in the ‘privileged position’ of explaining indigenous spirituality because, he says, he himself is not an indigenous philosopher ‘proper’. 58 Once again, then, Turner’s book can be read as a warning to the Western reader. Do not excuse yourself (or anyone else) from listening to indigenous philosophers and intellectuals and understand the urgency of ‘asserting and protecting the rights, sovereignty, and nationhood of communities’, 59 but do not think that indigenous philosophy is necessarily compatible with Western philosophy and do not think that elements of it are just going to slot right into the Western curriculum or idiom.

No doubt it is not easy to think this through, but that again is the point. We will not ‘expand the still excessively ethnocentric horizons of ‘our’ philosophy’ 77 by staying within familiar conceptual terrain.

‘the conclusion was drawn that plants cannot communicate because they lack the mechanisms that animals use to speak. The potentials for plants were seen purely through the lens of animal capacity’. This kind of anthropomorphism, which she associates (in contrast with the animist grammar of the Potawatomi language) with the arrogance of English assumes that ‘the only way to be animate, to be worthy of respect and moral concern, is to be a human’.

Plants do not live in gender-segregated societies in which individuals find themselves subject to normative expectations concerning their social roles, behaviour and physical being. Plants do not live in or have the responsibilities of nuclear or even blended or chosen families or other social groups. They cannot be gay or straight, cis or trans, chaste, abstinent or promiscuous.